I don't agree. "Sane" people introduces something which is frequently a false dichotomy; whether you are driven by your rationality, or by more visceral and deep-seated spirits. The problem is the difference between rationality and enlightened rationality: what is good for you personally in the short term, versus what is good for everybody in the longer term. These things can give contradictory advice, and both can be labeled as rational. But the second isn't intuitive to most people: it generally needs to be supplied from somewhere else, usually emotions.

Let's say you need to get drinking water from the river, but there are crocodiles down there too. If you minimize your risk, you'll get just enough water for yourself. On the other hand, if you get more than enough water, you'll be able to share your surplus, increase your social standing, find a more attractive mate, etc.

Ah! you say - but the "minimizing risk" here isn't actually minimizing risk, but increasing another risk, a risk that you'll never get anywhere in life, won't raise a family and pass on your genes, etc.

But that's an intellectual risk. It's not likely to dawn on you unless you're quite introspected, or perhaps until it's too late and you're in relative middle age.

What if there was a different mechanism? What if exploring the boundaries of your capability, your talents, was its own reward? You can't explore those boundaries without risk of failure, even where failure might include death. A simple mechanism for that could be risk homeostasis, whereby a certain manageable amount of risk becomes its own visceral reward, attracting you to those boundaries and encouraging you to expand them.

In other words, getting utility out of risk itself - "liking adventure".